mashupaustralia.org » Education & Training

Earth:Australia

Taskforce Secretariat — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:15:21 +0000

The Earth:Australia MashupAustralia contest entry responds to the challenge of demonstrating the enormous benefits to be gained with open access to government information.

Earth:Australia addresses the transformation challenge of opening up government data sets in its ‘re-purposing’ of GIS (geographic information systems) data from ERSI shapefiles, to the more useable, and accessible KML (Keyhole Markup Language) format. KML files are supported by many different GIS viewers and as discussed in Wikipedia are excellent for: ‘expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers’.

The technology Infrastructure for Earth:Australia includes: Google Earth browser plugin for data viewing, Adobe Flex framework for the user interface, and the Geospatial Data Abstraction Libray (GDAL) with related application libraries for shapefile to KML format conversion.

Community Rivers – River Health Monitoring

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:11:15 +0000

Community Rivers is a not-for-profit, community-owned organisation helping to protect Australia’s rivers, creeks, wetlands, estuaries and bays. We have developed an online database with GMap capabilities to enable volunteers to post river health information collected from local waterways.

By incorporating the Mashup data into the site, volunteers can now view Government GIS mapping information to help strategically position their local river monitoring sites. For example, they can identify Government surface water monitoring stations, ground water bore sites, major river basins and protected areas across Queensland. They can identify Detox facilities around Victoria to encourage local communities to dispose of toxic substances, such as paint and batteries, at appropriate facilities to prevent them being illegally dumped down drains or directly into our rivers and creeks.

If you have been collecting data on the health of your local river, creek or wetland from anywhere around Australia and would like to submit you information online through our community-owned website, please send us a message using the Contact Us button on our home page at www.communityrivers.org.au.

Flip Explorer

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:08:24 +0000

Flip Explorer combines an interactive online search interface, 3D tagcloud, and timeline widget, with a natural and familiar reading environment for mashups of digital knowledge collections. The user interface has been designed to present as a ‘book’, where pages displaying parts of a collection can be read and easily browsed as you would any physical book. For the MashupAustralia contest, Flip Explorer uses the Powerhouse Museum Collection dataset, as well as the museum’s picture library. Search results are organised chronologically and indexed by time period for ‘timeline’ browsing.

GOVIS – visualising government

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00:36 +0000

A collaborative workspace for the visualisation of government structures, functions and datasets.

Currently this uses the Commonwealth Agency data released by the National Archives and the goal is to link this to all the other datasets that have been released.

EasyData

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:53:47 +0000

EasyData is a new user-friendly South Australian website that provides data on sixty social, environmental and economic indicators, allowing comparisons at Local Government and regional levels, or with the whole of State.

This makes EasyData a perfect tool for the staff of local government, regional development bodies, government agencies, and community associations, to substantiate grant writing, regional profiling, strategic planning, program evaluation, and evidence-based policy making.

EasyData is now the single, largest source of web-based information for South Australia’s metropolitan and rural regions. Used in conjunction with SA’s Strategic Plan, EasyData empowers communities to set regional targets and monitor performance against them.

Know Where You Live

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:49:02 +0000

Know Where You Live is the prototype of a data mashup that displays a range of Australian Government data based on your geographic location along with a Google satellite map and relevant photo from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, the State Records NSW or the State Library of New South Wales collection. The initial prototype was created in under 24 hours as part of the inaugural Govhack event in Canberra in October, 2009.

NeoGopher 16 lists and 26 HTTP APIs

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:45:23 +0000

Our submission has two parts:

Part one: 16 MashupAustralia lists in NeoGopher.
NeoGopher is a universa data browser developed in Melbourne, Australia and is designed to allow browsing of an HTTP web based API. NeoGopher is the intersection of linked data and the web. We have created 16 NeoGopher lists, each list presenting a data set from data.australia.gov.au. To see our MashupAustralia lists, download NeoGopher http://www.neogopher.com/downloads.shtml

Part two: 26 HTTP web based APIs.
We have converted CSV and XLS data from data.australia.gov.au into 26 HTTP web based XML APIs. These APIs are accessible by the public and support Xquery access including searching, sorting, paging and return compressed XML.

Shades Of A Sunburnt People

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:38:45 +0000

Australians come in all shapes, sizes, ages, incomes, educations and ancestries. Our site allows you to explore the various shades of Australians by selecting from a range of demographic overlays. Each rapidly shades our nation in attractively sunburnt tones (though users may select their own colour spectrum too), representing the range of Australian diversity at the highest resolution for which data are available.

Our interface also allows users to customise the range of values they want mapped to their preferred colour spectrum – allowing them to make comparisons between their suburb or town and the next one over, just as easily as they can compare between states or rural and urban areas. The default settings allow our map to fit neatly on the lowest-resolution monitors common today, but a drop down interface allows it be quickly resized to present a more detailed display to users with larger monitors.

Australia is a a large nation with a diverse people; that makes for a very large amount of information embedded in our deceptively simple page. Still, our custom rendering algorithms ensure that overlays, however dense the information they present, appear without any long delays.

You might examine your own suburb or town, study the way geography shapes the people who settle in different places in your city or state or try to gain a deeper understanding of the multicultural patchwork of our nation. Whatever the questions this tool helps you answer, we hope you enjoy visually exploring the demographic shades of our sunburnt people.

Where to Live

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:24:46 +0000

WheretoLive.com.au is a search tool designed to help Australians find their ideal suburb or town.

By comparing proximity to essential and emergency services with suburb profiling data provided by the ABS, Australians now have a unique opportunity to research their next move.

Race Around Your Block

Taskforce Secretariat — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:18:52 +0000

How Green Is Your Block?
What’s your current Green Block Point Score?
Want more points? Add them!
Start a community garden. Add a placemarker. Connect with neighbours.
Find a bike rack. Mark and Organic Food Store. Placemark a park!